Just because you are bad at utilizing your brain doesn’t mean an AI would be bound to those restrictions. The brain is actually an incredibly powerful computer.
Mad disrespect to you as well!, Mr. I’m Totally Super Smarty For Real Pants!
You know “computers” originally referred to people that would compute equations, right? I didn’t realize there were people that thought we actually built computers because they were less powerful than our existing computers.
You really do learn something (about the average level of education) every day
“you” here refers to humans as a whole. Your brain is a product of natural selection, it’s not designed to do the job it does. That being said, an AI could design a meat brain from the ground up and have it idealized.
The brain can perform “a billion billion” operations per second, whereas modern cpus average about 2-3 billion operations per second. The brain is about a billion times better than modern cpus.
We would definitely be affected by a strong enough solar flare. But the solution is simple, just burry yourself, in a Faraday cage if necessary, so the AI can do just that.
But Hollywood has shown us again and again that the overwhelming force of evil always leaves a small but super-easily accessible hole in their security which allows the good guys to disable it immediately. And since AI is trained on those movies it will do exactly the same thing.
I’m glad you came to some conclusion, I’m still trying to find a pattern in it. everything he said is true in a biased generalizing fallacy type of way. Even though he contradicted himself at least twice.
I have a fuckin’ dolt of an uncle who was trying to tell me that points ignition is better than electronically controlled ignition. Like??? Yeah dude I love adjusting my spark timing by hand it’s so much fun 🙄
I’m guessing here, but it could be the feel of direct control and accomplishment. If it goes out, you can fix it. If you adjust it, you control it.
Manual transmission gives you that feeling of complete control of the vehicle. If you keep it in 2nd, it stays in 2nd. Whereas drifting around in an automatic is possible, the feeling isn’t the same. If you exceed the limited rpm, the system kicks in and shifts to 3rd.
It’s more of a pride/accomplishment/feeling than a fact. The fact is, automatic vehicles are more efficient in most cases. But people (myself included) prefer manuals for the feeling of control.
Maybe that’s the same with your uncle and his knowledge and skill.
Ignition, not transmission. In old cars, there’d be a contact that span round and touched other contacts to trigger the spark plugs at the right time. In a modern car, that’s done electronically, and so doesn’t start out and need replacing, and can vary the spark timings based on things like speed and temperature while the engine’s running instead of just when you have the bonnet open.
So I actually prefer manual transmission myself, but there is no reason to prefer points. They’re super frustrating. It would be like going backwards from fuel injection to carburetors. Like I’m a tinkerer don’t get me wrong but some stuff is just… worse
I find that very hard to believe when I can keep my car from unnecessarily downshifting when going up a slight incline. Or putting it in neutral while coasting.
Hell when I first got my car the avg mpg was 21mpg and after driving it for a few months I’ve gotten it up to 30.
This is obviously anecdotal evidence so if anyone has more info on it that’d be great
There’s a few articles out there. A search on Google scholar might show some more results but I just clicked one of the first ones for, “automatic vs manual transmission efficiency”
To the driver, a continuously variable transmission (CVT) operates a lot like an automatic. You don’t have to operate a clutch, and you simply put the car in drive to go. Unlike manuals and automatics, however, CVTs have infinite combinations of gear ratios. What that means is that a CVT can always send power to the wheels from the engine in the most fuel-efficient way possible.
When I was a kid, things were pretty much the same! Y’all are doing roughly what I would do. Life was pretty OK back then. You kids have similar things to deal with. And everything nowadays looks to be about as challenging as what we used to have. Life was quite OK back then! But you kids have experienced a similar quality of life.
I like today’s music but it seems derivative. Maybe I’m full of shit, and feel free to tell me why, but it seems like music from my dad’s youth (which I also like) was way different than mine, but nothing has changed that much since then.
You could take today’s music and put it on a radio station in the 90s and it wouldn’t seem out of place if you didn’t know any better. I don’t think the same is true for 90s music on a 60s or 70s station.
Not Nirvana, wrong genre. But it wouldn’t be out of place on one of my metal stations, but I don’t have to wait for that because now I have a station based on them, thank you for that.
But Morbid Angel came up after a few songs (to be fair it was a more recent song) and that’s kind of my point. Stations based on a 90s band will get me recent stuff and vice versa. If I make a Who station, Elvis doesn’t come up. If I make a Joplin station, L7 doesn’t come up. You usually get a pretty narrow time frame for anything pre-90s, after that it’s anything goes.
That’s not to say Igorrr sounds exactly like anyone from 30 years ago, but it’s an evolution as opposed to a revolution.
Edit: several songs later I got NIN, Mr. Self Destruct, it doesn’t get much more 90s than that.
A good chunk of that is going to be because the 90’s was around the time when digital tools became accessible, good, industry wide things, and we haven’t had a kind of big musical innovation since that point, as far as the technology itself goes. That transition probably happened more noticeably in the 2000’s, but you could tell it was happening over the course of the 90’s for sure. The music industry has also not changed that much, we’re still very much living in that reagan kind of neoliberal huge music label era, but that’s kind of been around forever, so I kind of doubt that’s been a major change from the 60’s up to now. You could maybe say that streaming and the internet has changed music, and it certainly has, because now there are no gatekeepers, everyone listens to everything, and lots of artists put out like, a 10 minute single that changes styles six times so it might be propagated better online, instead of like a 90 minute experimental album. But then, there are more room for both of them, because people are more easily able to find what they want, and the latter was never gonna be mainstream anyways.
If I had to point out a larger genre shift, there has definitely been a large mainstreaming of rap and this kind of “pop country” more recently. You had those in the 90’s, kind of infamously, but hootie and the blowfish does not really sound like modern country through some cultural progression that I don’t really understand because I’m not brushed up on it. NWA and Tupac do not sound the same as modern rap, which has been getting a lot more of a “soft” kind of vibe, which I’d probably attribute to the influence of like, kanye, and maybe some lo-fi stuff like nujabes, and maybe just a mainstreaming of the genre at large. The subject matter has shifted, the tone has shifted, and the music itself has changed. Those genres would not sound the same, relative to their 90’s counterparts.
The biggest thing I can think of that probably makes 60’s and 70’s music sound out of place next to 90’s music is probably how hair metal got killed by grunge, which I couldn’t really attribute to any one reason in particular. There’s a pretty clear line between your rock acts, which have been going forever, and your later metal acts, and that line still exists with grunge, but grunge marks a kind of tonal shift. You’d also have to ignore the whole of disco and club music, that motown shit from the 70’s and 80’s, which died out pretty hard, but most everyone does that anyways, so who cares. I don’t know if I’ve heard many 70’s or 80’s stations that actually play disco, certainly, not in proportion to how popular it was, usually they just play like. Stevie wonder, from what I’ve heard, shit like that. Or MJ. The thing you could probably derive from disco, from the 70’s and 80’s into the 90’s, would probably be like, drum and bass, and eurobeat, stuff like that, and then you’d get stuff like daft punk later on which has a pretty clear connection to disco generally.
I dunno, this is all to say, shit has substantially changed in almost every mainstream genre I can think of in the last like, 60 years, from the 60’s. Some stuff has remained pretty similar, and some stuff has had an almost cyclical nature, but that’s just kind of the nature of music, I think.
That’s an interesting point about the accessibility of digital tools. Without a completely new way to craft a sound nothing could sound all that different.
Although I do like “real” country music (sorry about the gatekeeping) “pop country”, Nashville pop, or whatever you want to call it, is the one genre of music I dislike the whole of. I guess it’s different from other country but it’s similar enough to generic pop I wouldn’t consider it new.
I do agree about rap/hip-hop though. The artists I listen to now are very different than what I listened to in the 90s and there is a much wider variety of style. I wonder how much of that is due to how easy it is to discover new artists now. Back in the 90s learning about underground rap artists, or underground anything, wasn’t easy.
So strange that everyone looks back at hip-hop in the 90s and 90% of the time it’s about stuff like Tupac and NWA, while another parallel current with bands such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Arrested Development gets overlooked.
Those bands were extraordinary, like Hip Hop in a tradition of Stevie Wonder, and kept putting out excellent albums that sound just as fresh today and are just as influential as anything from that era, but mid-decade the music industry swept them aside swiftly and unceremoniously, to make way for West Coast and Gangsta Rap.
I didn’t mean to suggest 90s rap was one-dimensional but it does seem like there is more variety now. But I wasn’t in an environment where I could buy local/touring hip hop tapes out of the trunk of a car, where I was that sort of thing was mostly punk and metal, so I never experienced all there was to offer. Maybe what I perceive as an increase is just due to streaming services making discovery so much easier.
Oh, I didn’t mean you, sorry if that’s the impression I gave, I was just pondering on things the way I’m remembering them.
Now that you mention “tapes out of a car”, before the internet there was another way that music spread in those days, for those of us who lived in smaller cities. Somebody would go to the cool city and take along his portable stereo, record tapes of the cool radio station, then back in town those tapes would circulate and get copied like bootlegs.
From LA in the 80s, it was KROQ with Punk, Post-Punk (The Stranglers, Joy Division) and Technopop (Depeche Mode, Human League, etc.).
In the 90s it was MARS FM with Techno and House.
I can only imagine the Hip-Hop that was being played in low-power radio stations in places like NYC or Philly.
A friend used to go to San Francisco every summer, brought back a bunch of tapes from the LIVE 105 graveyard shift, all carefully catalogued with dates, DJs and playlists. It was like KROQ but more subtle and varied, listening to those tapes felt exotic and meaningful.
One time he brought back a tape of KFJC, one where I first heard things like Liquid Liquid and Pharoah Sanders; that one felt like my mind got a firmware upgrade. Extraordinary.
Since the internet and starting with Real Player, now the entire world is at our fingertips (and ears), and I’m glad about this, but I will forever be grateful for those tapes from back when we weren’t directly plugged into “the action”.
I think if you take today’s pop music and do a side by side comparison with 90s pop you’d be surprised by how different they are. Not to mention, there are many many electronic genres and subgenres around today that have arisen in recent years.
The best radio stations to me today, the ones that keep me compelled, are ones that mix freely from all eras (including this one) and genres. Try BBC Radio 6 Music, or WPRB (from Princeton University), Soho Radio.
From what I hear on these stations, where DJs are expected to fearlessly put on whatever they like, it seems, the music of today sounds just as good as from any other era, but for me it’s always been about discovery, and sometimes that includes being a little uncomfortable, I like to teach my mind a new groove every once in a while and it has been known to resist. It happens to all of us, I’m afraid, more and more as we get older.
That said, I can comfortably be against some music industry tendencies, there is no “pop utopia” in the past.
Last decade it’s been software tools like autotune; in the 90s the “volume wars” began and frankly, most USA rock sounds too similar, all trying to channel Led Zep and Black Sabbath through a punkish filter; in the 80s many bands were overproduced half to death, submerged in sonic synthetic fluff, all the new studio toys abused, layer upon layer upon layer.
In the proper hands, these technologies can help a piece of music shine brighter, but in the hands of producers following the bandwagon - and that’s always been the majority of 'em - everything ends up sounding the same, like neon ads all around you.
I think the big reason people think that music from another time was better is because you only get to hear the good songs; they stopped playing the shitty ones long ago.
Based off the number of absolute bangers from that decade, I can only conclude that there were either more musicians or fewer bad songs.
Seriously: there are more legendary songs than months in that decade; And there are more songs which are merely incredible than there were weeks in the decade.
Maybe all that asbestos in the air caused better music.
Probably I just like rock-inspired sound from that era. Music shifts all the time and it’s just a matter of personal preference. It feels like rock splintered into fractile sub-genres which never quite hooked me in the same way.
Punk and metal had a lot of progress in later decades, but their wellspring feels like the 80s.
I had to read it three times, because I didn’t find it funny at all in any sense and I was trying to find a funny twist, but I didn’t succeed. It’s too real for me
Yeah, because if there’s one thing everyone knows about Extra Fabulous it’s that it’s perfect for syndication! Why, there’s only TWO instances of the world’s most versatile word in this one and literally no ejaculate!
Kidding aside, it’s fine if you didn’t like the comic, but that was one of the worst takes I’ve seen in all of 2023 🤦😄
I didn’t laugh either. Though I think the contradiction of “life fucking sucked back then” followed by “life was fucking awesome back then” was supposed to be funny.
Oooh, I think you’re right. I was so carried by the reality of all the statements that I missed that the 2nd and 4th panels feature statements which are diametrically opposite.
Thanks!!!
I’m still not laughing, but I get the twist and why it’s funny!
There used to be the genre of collect-'em-ups, where the thinly-veiled end goal was to just collect various items.
For example, to complete a level in Banjo-Kazooie, you had to collect 10 puzzle pieces and 100 musical notes, and you likely gathered lots more bonus collectibles along the way.
These were essentially just numbers going up. But we do all have that gatherer instinct in us, so if you can get past the meaninglessness, it’s just one of the easiest sources of endorphins.
And I feel like modern crafting systems evolved out of that. While you still can’t think too hard about it, they are providing meaning, in that you’re now collecting 100 wood planks, because you want to craft a house.
The unfortunate side effect is that they are now part of the soup which is pretty much mandatory to include in big budget games.
Indies are perfectly capable of fleshing out individual endorphin sources these days, so AAA games need to outdo them by having multiple. And the whole collect+craft loop is an endorphin source that can be added relatively easily to many game concepts, especially if you’re also buying into the mandatory open world.
So, I guess, the moral of the story is: AAA bad, indies good.
But like, for real. AAA won’t stop using the collect+craft loop, unless we have another massive technology jump where their big budget becomes useful again (like with 2D -> 3D, back in the days).
So, if you’re tired of it, you do want to look into smaller budget games or, I guess, some of the few remaining niche AAA titles…
Kind of highlights fallout 4s biggest story frustration, for me anyway.
Even on my first playthrough I never felt tied to the prewar life or the family from it. I think 3 did a better job showing us why we should care about our dad and finding him that was absent in 4. After waking up and getting your bearings it was super weird going on tons of side quests and then in dialogue being so serious about finding your kid. I really enjoy fallout 4 but the kid aspect never has clicked for me.
There’s been a whole slew of games (old and new) pushing a child sidekick or helper character, like Yakuza 6, God of War, Last of Us etc. All well loved and successful games by any measure, but the whole “here’s this kid you have to care about” thing doesn’t work for me either.
This is why i never finished 4, the main chest ruined an otherwise very entertain-able way, i was about become a dad, am now. The player character made no sense to me and i felt like the game was forcing me trough the main quest line before i was supposed to do anything else.
FO4 has such a sudden start when you think about it. The game starts and the bombs almost immediately start falling and your spouse dies and son taken within like the first 10 minutes of the game.
Would have been cool if you started in the war wearing power armor, then came home to your family after facing the horrors of war, made your face, adapt back to normal life and get to know family and neighbors over a couple of time skips, then the bombs happen in the middle of one of those events. Grow some attachment like FO3 did.
Ngl I kinda wish fo4 did more with the pre war aspect. Like I’ll admit I’m a sucker for 50s ascetic but I kinda want a fall out game to take place pre war. Fo4 and fo3s anchorage dlc are the best glimpses into pre war life. Like imagine if we got the opportunity to drive around with one of those pre war cars.
Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. I would go further and say that 3 did a better job with the overall story. 4’s gameplay is what kept me playing but I found the whole story just lacking in any nuance. It was more bland than 3’s even though it’s basically a rehash of it. Once the wonders of exploration have settled, I just felt like there was no point in doing another playthrough since it all boiled down to picking from two real factions that lead to the same ending. They really stripped the role playing aspect from their supposed action RPG
Bethesda have been on a downward spiral of main quest quality since Oblivion (possibly morrowind, never played it to say for sure).
Fallout 3 is just utterly forgettable as a game, both from a story perspective and a sandbox perspective.
Skyrim and Fallout 4s main quests are absolute garbage, and would ruin the games completely if they were not just big beautiful sandboxes to play in, with ripe and fertile ground for brilliant modding to take place in.
also I thought your name was CryptidBestiality at a glance, lol.
Both are kinda true. We didn’t have all of human knowledge in our pocket at all times, the ability to meet people of the same interests across the planet, and the ability to order pretty much anything we want within the day.
We also could afford a decent living situation, it wasn’t a daily struggle to remain thin, and weren’t seriously worried about a Christian Nationalism take over.
It is like everything that depended on shared institutions got worse and everything that depended on one individuals or single companies got better.
and weren’t seriously worried about a Christian Nationalism take over.
this was around since the 80s and before.
EDIT : here’s a great quote from 94
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.
Said in November 1994, as quoted in John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience (2006).
My high school history teacher idolized Goldwater, but Goldwater would have hated him.
Fun anecdote: The eurozone once came up in discussion and he said that he and one of the hyper-Christian students in our class were going to march down to Washington and warn them about the impending one-world currency and the coming of the end times 🎉🥂🎉
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